The “Cellule de Réflexion sur l’Insertion Professionnelle” is a working group of your senior colleagues who represent a range of different scientific and professional experiences. They offer their time to help you reflect about your career plans and future and prepare for attaining that future. You are expected to meet with them at least twice during your thesis but they are very helpful and are willing to spend more time with you if you want.

Your thesis represents an important step in preparing your future. The thesis, the research you carry out, the courses you take and the workshops and congresses you attend represent goals in themselves, of course, but more importantly, they represent a means to an end, your integration into a career.

A thesis is multifaceted, and as such, can prepare you for a variety of possible futures. The CRIP is there to help you identify these, choose the one you like best, and attain the one you choose. You may start a thesis with a very clear idea of where you want to go. You may start a thesis because you are fundamentally interested by a subject and had the opportunity of devoting yourself to it for three years. Whatever your reason, we expect you to think about your future while you are undertaking your doctoral work. This is one of your many tasks as a doctoral candidate.

To help you best use this doctoral training period to prepare the best future possible we ask you to take some time early on to think about what you want to do with your life and how the thesis you are engaged in will help you get there. Put another way, this will help determine how to plan your thesis so that it will help you the most to attain the future you want.

As a first step we ask you to write a small text – no more than a page, explaining what you want to do or listing possible career options for yourself, i.e. ways you could imagine profitably and enjoyably spending 40 hours per week for 45 weeks per year for the next 40 years or so and if you can tie this in with your thesis it would be very good. Also, if there are things that are, for you, completely unimaginable as possible careers, please mention them. This is not trivial. Also, this is your life we are talking about. It is not a waste of time to take some to think about how you will spend that life.

Please submit this text to the CRIP as soon as you can but certainly within the first 6 months of your thesis. The CRIP will offer a number of dates for a personal interview to discuss with you.

As you advance in your thesis work the CRIP is there to, in addition to helping you discover different possibilities that may be open for your future, help you structure your cv and prepare for job interviews.